Nonprofit Membership Associations: Serving Members Today or Shaping the Field for Tomorrow?

As the nonprofit sector has had to shift in response to “small government” by diversifying revenues and responding to greater social needs, there is one type of nonprofit entity that has remained largely overlooked as a potential change agent. I’m talking about membership associations that support groups of nonprofits unified by a common geography, type of entity, or cause.

What make membership-based intermediary organizations so important are the same reasons that they are not that exciting to talk about: Membership associations are the glue connecting the people that comprise the nonprofit sector together; they are a primary piece of infrastructure that enables the sector; and they are the ‘institutional memory’ of their fields helping to retain past knowledge while ramping up new professionals. In fact, researchers have attributed the “carrying capacity” of a community’s nonprofit sector (i.e., how many nonprofits a community can sustain) to how well a community has developed an infrastructure of “network exchanges” (Paarlberg and Varda, 2009). In other words, yes, nonprofits need money, but if you want to see results, take a look at how well nonprofits are networked. A nonprofit working in isolation is less capable of realizing its mission than one that is connected to others.